Need for Speed : legitimized

Need for Speed : legitimized

You’re probably wondering why your site has to be fast in order to affect your SEO. One simple reason; User Experience.

We recently ran some tests on our website. The results are good, our website scored 98/100 on the important metrics, with a load time of under 1 second, and a page weight of about 1/2 MB. Pretty impressive – for a wordpress site. You can run your own tests here: tools.pingdom.com – see any problems on that report? Pick up the phone and dial 781.321.5159.

What does this have to do with SEO?

Google’s mysteriously wonderful algorithm uses myriad factors to determine how to rank your website among search engine results, and deliver good quality to the user on the other end of the keyboard. For the most part, the algorithm’s reasoning is either content (the written text, Search engine friendly URL, the titles, headers, H1’s etc.), the number and manner of relevant inbound links to the site, or measurements of the authenticity of the website itself (age of the domain name, number and quality of inbound links, etc.).

Why is speed important?

In 2010 – Google announced website speed would begin having an impact on search ranking. Now, the speed at which someone could view the content from a search result would be a factor. In other words, how quickly can you deliver relevant content to the person? It’s a user experience metric; and it shows that someone cares about the content delivery – and not just some weird matrix of backlinks from a link farm.

Later that year, in June of 2010 – Matt Cutts from Google announced that slow-performing mobile websites would now become penalized in search rankings. It’s pretty clear that your website needs to have a certain level of speed in order to be taken seriously by Google.

Clearly Google is an extremely intelligent organization, and they want to protect and enhance the experience of YOU – the end user. Faster websites can be interpreted as those that separate the good content from the spam. How fast is your website?